we are nostalgic for the attention span we had then
A few days ago I saw a tweet which said the following: “There was a time when happiness took the humble form of an ordinary afternoon. Coming home, turning on the PS2 and disappearing for hours.” It is one of those tweets that manage to strike a nostalgic chord and name something that many people feel but have not yet been able to articulate. The easy reading is the nostalgia of youth: we were young, we had no responsibilities, we had entire afternoons to lose in the GTA on duty. That’s true, but it’s only half the story. The other half is that we lived those afternoons with an attention that today is almost impossible to reproduce.. There was nothing competing for her. The screen was one, the world was that, and the mind stayed inside for hours without anyone calling it back. That no longer exists. Not because we have less free time, but also because adult life overwhelms us as is normal; but because the free time we have has stopped being habitable in the same way. The cell phone does not interrupt only when it rings: it interrupts all the time without doing anythingwith its mere presence in the pocket, with the always open possibility that there is something in there that we have not yet seen. The 2007/2008 academic year was absolutely spectacular for my group of friends. Of the six of us, four of us had a girlfriend. We all finished the course single. One of the reasons was that we loved spending hours together playing PES 2008. A few years later we wanted to recover those times but it was never the same, and what had changed was that we all now had smartphones and social networks, and We all ended up looking at it, the individual screen, instead of the TV, the collective screen.so we lost track of what others were doing and the experience was completely different. Even with solo play, loading screens, which were previously a moment of mental pause or going for another Coca-Cola, have become the automatic trigger for taking out the phone. The brains that grew up with those PS2 afternoons have been reconfigured to not tolerate even fifteen seconds of emptiness, just like when we wait for the elevator or have someone in front of us in line at the supermarket. The result is a strange form of loss that is difficult to name because nothing concrete is taken from you. Even though we have more responsibilities and less free time, we still have some moments. We still have access to games. What we don’t have is the ability to step inside them in the same way, to let the world narrow until only that exists. That ability, to pay complete attention to a single thing for hours, It was a resource that we didn’t know we had until it was taken away from us. so gradually that we do not notice at what exact moment it disappeared. That’s why the tweet didn’t actually talk about the PS2. I was talking about that. From the last time a plastic rectangle was enough to make the rest of the world cease to exist for an entire afternoon. In Xataka | The intellectual luxury of our era is sustaining our attention, AI is making it worse Featured image | Swello
